There is still very little coverage in the Western mainstream media of the May 23 Ukrainian drone attack on Russia’s Armavir missile-defense radar system, but what little there is, is significant.
An article by the Western Journal’s Jack Davis published on May 25 by msn.com came to the sober conclusion that the Armavir attack “could meet Russian conditions for nuclear war.” Davis reviewed coverage in Bloomberg, the War Zone and other publications, under the headline “Red Alert: Strategic Early Warning Radar Is Obliterated in Strike.” In the article, MSN repeatedly drew attention to the danger of nuclear war posed by the attempt to blind Russia’s early warning system for incoming ICBM attacks.
Davis quoted from Russia’s standing nuclear doctrine directly: “The War Zone wrote that by doing so, the attack could mean that one of Russia’s nuclear red lines has been crossed.… `The conditions specifying the possibility of nuclear weapons use by the Russian Federation’ include any `attack by [an] adversary against critical governmental or military sites of the Russian Federation, disruption of which would undermine nuclear forces response actions,’ Russia’s Basic Principles of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Nuclear Deterrence state said in a 2020 statement.”
Referring to Ukrainian attacks on April 11 and April 17 on another Russian early warning radar system, this one in Kovilkino, MSN concluded: “The extent of the damage in the April attack was unclear, but had radar been put out of commission, it, like the more recent attack, could meet Russian conditions for nuclear war.”
Bloomberg published a wire May 25 which cites “a person within the Ukrainian intelligence community,” who told them that the Armavir site was “hit by a drone launched by Ukraine’s military intelligence on Thursday [May 23], according to the source, who declined to be named because the information isn’t public.”
